Free The Ladies by Doris Grumbach Page A

by fear of poverty, even destitution, hounded by their own troubled indecision and misgivings. Where should they settle? How could they afford the high cost of life in provincial English towns? In London? They travelled in slow stages, explored with distaste the outcroppings of coal at Carmarthen in south Wales, and then went north towards Birmingham. Each village and township was considered a possible stopping place. Each was marked in Eleanor’s travel book with a plus or minus sign, and then noted was the number of miles distant from London.
    Later they were to think it curious that they felt no desire to consider for their settlement the alien world of Wales. In their first contact, the people seemed to them uncouth, small, too dark. The coarse bracken and heavy heather on the hills looked inhospitable, the precipitous mountains uncultivated, rude. A friendly coach driver (was not everyone they met too friendly, they wondered, especially the members of the serving class?) proudly pointed out to them great mounds that appeared to crop out of the Pembrokeshire hills, cromlechs of great antiquity and inexplicable heathen significance. Many believed they were stone monuments to the ancient Welsh dead. He told them legends surrounding those still-haunted megaliths, some of whose blue stones arranged in circles, he said, had been carried by Welshmen to Stonehenge. For five days they walked and drove about the area, listening gravely to alarming druidic myths. Merlin, the natives claimed, had made these stones dance and so ever after they were able to dance alone. The Ladies shuddered at the thought of a landscape so unreliable, so given to movement and impermanence, but they walked dutifully over the wet, windy hills and fields.
    They believed very little of what they heard. But they felt it urgent that they continue to move towards England, a fertile and pleasant place, they expected, where the tongue spoken was civilised and the weather less capricious and wild. These gregarious and brutish Welsh, leading superstitious lives on their unruly landscape, made them uneasy. Mountains infested by bog and mists, lowlands rutted by dark, wooded dingles, wild streams, rivers pouring down precipitous slopes like cataracts, depthless brooks: what could two gently reared Irish Ladies find among such violences to appeal to their cultivated sensibilities? In all that rugged wasteland and great-bouldered fierce countryside (for there seemed to be almost no cities), was there a haven for them?
    Finally they reached Birmingham and found a congenial inn. At once, Sarah sent word to Sir William and Lady Betty of their address, reminding them of the allowance due, for their funds had fallen low during their month of wandering. Eleanor made no effort to inform her relatives, remembering the demeaning terms of her promise.
    Comfortably lodged, but without presentable clothing, Eleanor decided they must find a tailor. Sarah wondered about the expenditure, but her companion told her they could no longer appear in public in their travel-worn and inappropriate clothing. A month had passed since their ‘elopement’ (as Mrs Tighe had named it to her Kilbride friends), or their ‘retirement’ as the Ladies themselves called the event from which they dated the beginning of their new lives. Eleanor still wore her borrowed men’s outer-garments and Sarah a gown she had donned on shipboard and for which she did not possess a change.
    They found a fine tailor, D. D. Sutton & Son Ltd., whose windows opened on High Street. It looked to be elegant, tasteful, and, no doubt, costly. Eleanor strode into the establishment first, Sarah a step behind. The proprietor, who introduced himself as Mr. Sutton the son, was well used to providing ladies with riding habits, worn by English gentry for travel by coach or horse. He greeted the two Ladies, heard their desires, and sent his sewing mistress into the disrobing room with them to take their